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My days of education are now behind me. Days spent in labs with barely enough sleep, a bottle of red bull in one hand while I agonized over my grades and a girl. Somehow it simultaneously felt too short and too long. I'd like to think that at the end of all this I've grown as a person but I'm not sure I have. Sure I've grown in knowledge perhaps in confidence too but the world still feels far too big for me to take on. There's a dearth of warm places, people I can anchor my soul to.

It's been five years. I don't know how to celebrate it this year, coming back to the Philippines. It didn't hit me to remember the day, April 1. I was too exhausted after the pressures of the exhibit. Traveling on the skyway one day made me miss Singapore so much. Leaving school, I don't know if I really have many friends. No one to celebrate that last bittersweet day with. It's my fault I know, never made much of an effort. It was far easier to cocoon myself with studies rather than dealing with people.

I say I hate people but secretly love them.

I miss the sensation of writing, forming words into tangible moments of beauty. The following is rescued from my notebook.

A book is more than the words, thoughts, feelings that it conveys. It is the entirety, the whole, a sensual experience rather than mere intellectual exercise. You begin with searching the shelf, eyes gazing across an expanse of words. You are overwhelmed, feeling like a soul drowned out by the homogenity of the human race. You reach out for another that can fill you, so is like the sensation of finding that book, the one that is yours.

And so you reach for it, snatching like an eager lover or slowly savouring the moment. Fingers play over the cover, tactile proof that perhaps your search is over...

I'm pretty damn sure Wednesday was a good day for me, I'm just puzzled at how I could not know it's a good day then. I think I suspected it but I couldn't appreciate it as the day progressed.

I was given a couple of offers for work, both a bit in the same field but one guaranteed money for doing basically crap jobs while the other couldn't guarantee but offers cooler opportunities to do something I care about. It brought me uncomfortably close to that question of whether you'll work for job satisfaction or for money. I've never considered that this situation would be a dilemma for me. I've always thought I would be able to choose job satisfaction without hesitation.

It was kinda flattering to think that my programming skills are in demand, no matter how dull I might consider them to be. Well, as compared to the trained students in my school anyway. I think Ronald knows the elite CSIT students. Irunno, kinda intimidating when I think of going up against them.

I start having a minor attack of nerves later that day when I couldn't find anyone else to go with me to watch a movie with the girl. I get to the cinema and I choose to leave a chair between us (her sis was with her) and at that time I thought I was doing the right thing. I don't know, no idea how anything stands right now, I'm just playing this blindly.

But the day after I kinda hate myself for not seizing the day. And then I keep waiting for the bad day that is surely attendant to myself after a good day like that. I don't know why, I'm not superstitious but it just feels right for some sort of balance to exist in the universe.